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| The Shard, London, June 2011 |
If you want to skip to the milonga, it's in the last four paragraphs.
The Shard was built not far from where I lived, latterly in London. It was all just an idea, a plan when I left for Scotland in 2007. As I came back to visit London first with a baby and toddler in 2010 then with very young children, then alone, it became a symbol for me of the continuation of London's development, while I was not there to see it, to be part of it. On my first trip to London for dance in 2013 I was looking for the boat for Tango on the Thames at its previous incarnation near Blackfriars Bridge. I had got off one tube stop too early at Embankment instead of Temple. I decided to walk up the Embankment towards Blackfriars, somewhere after Waterloo Bridge, the second seen in this photo, where I expected the boat to be.
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| Jubilee/Hungerford bridges, Embankment to the left |
Near one of these iconic dolphin/sturgeon lamp standards (this one is a copy on the South Bank of the Embankment's nineteenth century originals) I found myself looking across the river.
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Vulliamy's dolphin lamps |
All around me were signs of my previous life in London. I had lived there for only five years but the city ensnared me as nowhere had before. The old Hungerford bridge was how I had approached London from Waterloo when I began to know the city better. It was narrow and noisy next to the clattering train line in to Charing Cross. The more pedestrian-friendly Jubilee Bridge next to it was not built until 2002. Shell Mex house - the Art Deco building with the clock face - was where I worked on a project. English National Opera was barely ten minutes walk away. I used to bike down from Marylebone to get in for £10 in the stalls with a student card from Birkbeck college to see far better productions than I ever saw at the more famous Covent Garden. That seemed to me to be for people who cared more about money and the opera experience and telling people about it (I met them, elsewhere) than about the innovative, interesting productions at the Coliseum. There used to be good classical CD shops run by rather intimidating, knowledgeable young men on the South Bank and St Martin's Lane. The Savoy Grill was just behind me where I once had a meal and Rules that I never did get to.
All around were the upper rooms of pubs used by amateur philosophy groups that I visited before deciding to study it properly and venues some friends and I used for an ambitious non-fiction reading group which, surprisingly lasted for a few years despite its origins in Kew far away in west London and my moves on to Marylebone in the centre and Borough to the south. Up-river, west, St John's, Smith's Square where I had been to marvellous concerts: Masaaki Suzuki performing some of the Bach cantatas and where I heard, rapt, the first of many Bach Passions live for the first time. Further back on on Albemarle Street - the first one-way street in London created after the gridlock caused by the popularity of Humphrye Davy's lectures - the Royal Institution. I became enthralled with science there in my late twenties, realising at last there, in other well known venues for public lectures and in late night conversation in Gordon's wine bar just behind me that truth, even partial truth is more marvellous and stranger than the consolatory fiction of religion which I had grown up with, weekly. Permeating it all was a personality who had introduced me to many of these things and who had also pointed me in the general right direction of so many things as I was about to waste my mid to late twenties on just work and poor lit-fit in suburbia beyond the M25.
Across the river, the South Bank. Here I pushed my first baby in his pram on great loops through Southwark during the difficult first months when between frequent stays in St Thomas's Hospital I was too shaken by motherhood to take him on the vertiginous escalators down to the Underground to try going elsewhere. Green Park was as far as I ever got besides a couple of mistaken trips to Oxford street with a newborn, in the battle to feel normal. There was the London Eye where the second child, agile, rumbustious, utterly fearless and barely two, disappeared into the crowds on his scooter. I had brought them down on an early foray to the capital by train from Scotland. There was the development of shops and restaurants outside the Royal Festival Hall which shops were built while I lived in London. Hard to remember there was nothing really there before. On the same day, the same child vanished again on his scooter in the time it took to turn my head to see if his brother was following. I have lost my children, nearly always the same younger, toddling, bluestreak son, in a park near a river here in Perth, from inside the Ladies in Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh, from a playpark in Switzerland (actually, that was under daddy's eye), at North Berwick beach, twice on the Southbank and other places I don't care to remember. As I raced past the diners sitting outside the restaurants a woman, understanding that instant, lurching terror, called out to me. He had scooted inside a neighbouring restaurant...
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| Diana Memorial Playground, Kensington Gardens with the wonderful, indefatigable Tiggy |
From the Embankment I looked at the Shard nearly finished and was surprised to find myself overwhelmed. I realised I felt bereft of London and my old life. In nearly the same moment I also realised that like the river in flux, nothing stays the same and that I was recreating my London, when I brought my children here to make their own discoveries
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| South Bank |
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| Trafalgar Square |
London, March 2015, Sunday: I went to Tango on the Thames (now my second or third visit) for all of half an hour at the end. DJ Tony. The new boat used now I heard is a bit smaller and not in quite the same location. It was not my kind of music. The best track was Clavel del aire (1937) amid a tanda of less well known/poor OTV. There were two "extra" tracks after La Cumparsita.
The dancing wasn’t what I personally prefer. The ronda was lamentable. As is the case with places like La Mariposa, Tango Garden and 178 - and not like, say, Tango Etnia or Corrientes - I often hear these social dances called “friendly”. I have discovered this is tango code. Some milongas are described thus by dancers who struggle to get dances at places with better dancing. It is not surprising that places with good dancing often do attract discriminating dancers, so less accomplished dancers can sometimes struggle and find them “unfriendly”. My dancing is not accomplished; it lacks years of experience and it is certainly simple. For these and other reasons like height, age and all sort of other things like many I can struggle to dance especially in places where I am not known.
None of this really matters though. Milongas attract certain types of dancers in the way different books attract different readership or in the way that anything offering a product or service attracts a particular group or market segment. It is absurd to be snobby about what books you read or what events you like to go to. It is just a question of preference. I don’t really understand how preference converts into snobbery. Taste is surely just difference in preference and I don’t really understand how taste works. The reason I objected to those claims about Troilo-Marino was because they were trying to co-opt preference into some idea of sophistication and to say on no justification at all that that kind of music, was better than others. That, in my view, is snobbery of the worst kind because it manipulates beginners and preys on natural (if mistaken) feelings of inadequacy at being beginners. It tries to persuade people to accept something just because some others think it so and because if they don't, well then they won't be that sophisticated, will they. What is sophistication anyway? Smoke and mirrors by the sounds of things.
At Tango on the Thames it was very hot and the floor was horribly sticky. I have noticed at Tango West too, that the temperature affects the floor significantly. The floor also had a remarkable slope. I haven’t heard a report though about the new boat. The price in March was steep for milongas in my experience - £16 including a buffet. I was glad I had not paid for the full experience. I see now that dancing on the new boat is £10 including tea and biscuits and there is an adjoining restaurant for those who want to eat. It probably isn’t really fair to say how a place was based on a half hour experience but the feeling of the milonga and what I saw was much the same as when I’ve been in the past. I heard in September a much better report about the same DJ’s music though no change on the dancing front.
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